WILMINGTON, Delaware — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once picked up a bear that had been killed by a motorist and left it in New York’s Central Park with a bicycle on top of it, sparking a mystery that gripped the city a decade ago.
Kennedy described the incident in a video posted to social media on Sunday. He said the video would be included in a New Yorker article that he said would be damaging.
It’s the latest bizarre incident in Kennedy’s quixotic campaign that has divided his famous family and left Republicans and Democrats concerned about his potential impact on the presidential election. Kennedy has admitted to infecting his brain with a parasite and killing him. He denied eating a dog after a friend shared a photo with Vanity Fair of Kennedy dramatically poised to take a bite of a charred animal; Kennedy said it was a goat.
In the video, Kennedy tells the story to actress Roseanne Barr. He says he was on his way to a falconry excursion with friends when a woman driving in front of him struck and killed the young bear with her vehicle. He says he put the bear in his own vehicle, intending to skin it and eat the meat, but the day passed him by.
Eventually, he said, he was in Manhattan and had to remove the bear’s carcass from his vehicle. His friends, fueled by alcohol, came up with the Central Park plan as a joke, he said, adding that he himself was not drunk. At the time, bicycle accidents were a hot topic in the media, so Kennedy and his friends thought it would be funny to make it look like the bear had been hit by a bicycle.
Two women walking with their dogs found the dead bear and alerted authorities, sparking a mystery that gripped the city for several days. Bears are not part of the known wildlife population in the park.
The bicycle was examined for fingerprints and the animal was sent to Albany for a necropsy, which revealed it was a bear. probably hit by a vehicle and was not a victim of animal abuse. But how the bear ended up in Central Park remained a mystery.
“I was concerned because my fingerprints were all over the bike,” Kennedy tells Barr in the video.